I think the car analogy is quite meaningless. The car manufacturers are
entirely responsible for the car as a system and cannot sell it without
stringent safety criteria being met. This would not be possible without
them having control over the components and their integration into the
whole system. There are bits they could leave out such as radios but not
anything necesaary to drive the car.
The OS in a computer is more like the driver of the car. The car company
is not responsible for how anyone drives, provided the car is designed
in such a way to make it safe for suitable drivers (e.g. not children,
or people who have some disability unless it has been modied). Computers
can run perfectly well under many different operation systems provided
they are built with the appropriate compatibility. The monopoly enjoyed
by Microsoft prevents consumers choosing their OS of choice. For
software that runs under Windows I prefer XP, but my laptop bundled with
Windows 7 home edition cannot be "downgraded" to XP. This is quite wrong
and trading standards organisations are wrong to let MS get away with
their domination of the hardware manufacturers and retail distributer
network.
Howard Lane
GreenNet
On 5/3/2013 14:51, Albert Dengg wrote:
> hello,
> On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 01:31:49AM +0100, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
> ...
>> It is not about companies and marketplace. It is about consumers who
>> consider options that provide a good balance between quality and price
>> of the products they buy. Freedom to modify the product may be
>> considered by some, but still it is within some balance.
>>
>> For example would you pay 100.000 euros for a car where you can replace
>> engine, lights, seats, cpu, software etc, or would you buy a 15000 mass
>> produced one? The example is exaggerated, but consider that even smaller
>> price differences, make a lot of impact to certain people.
> I think your analogy is not entirely accurate:
> the situation with cars is actually that they tend to include more and
> more technology to actually prevent the customer from changing
> anything...not because it is a technical requirement but to be able to
> sell more expensive spare parts.
>> So in almost every example I can think of, if companies are forced with
>> legislation to break their products in multiple separate parts, prices
>> would go up in the average case, and go down in few (geeky) cases. Do
>> you really believe the average person is prepared to pay more for
>> something that has not any immediate impact visible to him (not everyone
>> is a mechanic or software developer). Most probably he'd just import his
>> product from a country where they don't have those laws.
> well...how would it be more expensive for them?
>
> we are actually not asking to support linux in particular (in the way
> that you can call their support hotline and start asking questions on
> running linux on their hardware), but only to leave out a non essential
> part (like for example you would want to order your car withouth leather
> seats because you want to use your custom velvet seat covers and
> therefore have no use for the more expensive extra option of leather
> seats).
>
> yours,
> albert
>
>
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> Discussion(a)fsfeurope.org
> https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
Hi all!
In short:
I am looking for a large banner/poster/roll-up like this:
https://fsfe.org/news/2012/report-1212/chorlton.jpg
For an event in April: http://commonsfest.info
In detail:
I am looking for FSFE promotion material for a festival, which a few
friends and I are organizing. The "Festival of the Commons" intends to
promote such things as peer-to-peer collaboration, freedom of knowledge,
copyleft licensing, and of course free software.
The festival will be in Heraklion, Crete, in six weeks from now during
the 14-21 April 2013. Besides talks and workshops there will be an
exhibition with some info booths. That's where I would like to make some
fliers and other info material available to the visitors. I already
found some fliers etc. on the fsfe.org server, which we can print
ourselves. Is there some big banner, poster, roll-up or such available
during that time, which we could borrow for one week.
Cheers,
Jann
--
PS. I also set up a fellowship event, I hope that's okay:
https://wiki.fsfe.org/FellowshipEvents/CommonsFest%202013
Yeah, I don't expect there will be much GNU in Firefox OS. Personally I would love to see a mobile GNU distro that stipulates software freedom, but compared to the utter jail that is iOS and the mirky grounds of Android/Linux I can only praise Mozilla's efforts.
They might be talking about the "open web" instead, which is somewhat conflicting with the Free Software point of view, but their take on apps do give the opportunity to give the users the freedom they deserve. I could for example host my own apps, licensed under the AGPL and there won't be any shitty App Store rules preventing this.
But still, I would love to have a GNU in my pocket :)
Jelle
-------- Original message --------
From: "Andreas K. Foerster" <list(a)akfoerster.de>
Date: 27/02/2013 19:33 (GMT+01:00)
To: discussion(a)fsfeurope.org
Subject: Name of the system (was: Firefox Mobile + Geeksphone = Awesome)
Hello,
i think, it would be great if Firefox OS gets adopted.
One aspect, that I don't like however, is the choice of the name.
It uses Linux as it's kernel, and which libc does it use? The GNU libc?
Well, it was always unfortunate that most people don't mentioned GNU.
Now they stop even mentioning "Linux". They call it "Android", "ChomeOS",
"Firefox OS"... whatever.
Even large distros like Ubuntu and even Debian stopped to name it on their
frontpage!
Most people think GNU/Linux is an odd system, because barely anybody uses it,
they think. However that is not the reality. GNU/Linux is almost everywhere.
The real problem is not that it is barely used, but that those, who use it,
very often are not aware that they do.
I think, what we really need is, a better "marketing" for GNU/Linux.
--
AKFoerster <http://AKFoerster.de/>
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